Abri de Swardt
To Walk on Water
11/05/2011 - 11/06/2011
(click on image for colour version)
(WORKS FEATURED IN THIS EXHIBITION)
Bartholomeu Dias I (The Sao Cristovoa anchors). 2009. In situ photograph, Mosselbay. Photo credit: Xanelé van Rensburg
"To be the best in the world is the biggest challenge.” Bryan Habana
Afoot, walking on water, the bastion of patriarchy has his eyes set on the Elysian promise of the distant horizon and the subsequent virgin soil, but in a blink-of-the-instant he succumbs to the gravitational pull downwards. It is within this bodily immersion into fluidity that an outflow of change occurs: things dissolve, sink, melt and drown; nothing will be the same again.
To Walk on Water is an exhibition of photography and video by Abri de Swardt. Steeped in myth, the body of work draws upon Enlightenment tales of exploration, acts of colonial expansion, baptismal imagery, and the mechanics of inadequacy employed by men’s glossies. In instances of mimicry Bartholomeu Dias, Leda, Christ, Narcissus, Ophelia and Marat are summoned in collages and paper constructions directly unto the body in a move away from the man as island epitome towards a faith in falling. Enigmatic and agitational, De Swardt’s work is viscerally meditative, an aesthetics of drowning.
Abri de Swardt was born in Johannesburg in 1988 and graduated with a B.A. in Visual Arts (Fine Art) cum laude at Stellenbosch University where he is currently pursuing an Honours in Visual Studies. Significant participation in projects includes a residency at Liza Grobler’s Visitor at the Irma Stern Museum in October 2009; Mixtape Mobile Cinema, a travelling compendium of video art at the 2010 Grahams Town National Arts Festival; Anja de Klerk’s proposed curatorial project on the shortcomings of the South African art system, Art Now Now: the horse knows the way, presented at the ICI, New York, in June 2010; and KR!SP at art.b gallery in 2011. He has received merit awards at Sasol New Signatures and ABSA L’Atelier in 2009 and 2010 respectively, and was the recipient of the Timo Smuts prize for top Fine Art graduate at Stellenbosch University in 2010.
To Walk on Water will be his first solo exhibition and is accompanied by an electronic catalogue downloadable from the 13th of May onwards.
